31 December 2013

What I've been reading lately (2013)

Cosmopolis
by Don DeLillo. Unmistakably the voice of White Noise, but not quite as amusing this
time when the target of its attention is the ridiculousness of capitalist excess.

Ender's
Game by Orson Scott Card. As wonderful as it was the first time I read it, perhaps
more so. It is one of those rare books where every element that is there is essential in some
way.

Freedom
(TM) by Daniel Suarez. I have to admit I was skeptical about where Suarez was going
at the end
of Daemon,
but Freedom, the sequel, is even better than the original. The Daemon is now the
coordinator of a reputation-based economy, people are walking around with Google Glass
HUD glasses to tap in to the darknet, and government contractors are trying to shut it all
down. It touches on a lot of interesting ideas, everything from political decentralization to
farm subsidies. A highly enjoyable and propelling read. Recommended.

Jonathan
Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach. This parable about seagulls was was the #1 New
York Times Bestseller for two years straight. And about half of the book is photographs of
seagulls! The message is about self-improvement and transcendence. A little bit woo-woo for
my taste but given that you can read it in one sitting it's hard to argue that it's not worth
your time.

The
Mirage by Matt Ruff. In the weird mirror world of The Mirage, on 11/9,
Christian fundamentalists flew hijacked airplanes into the Tigris and Euphrates World Trade
Towers in Baghdad. Osama bin Laden is a senator of the United Arab States and the chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee. Saddam Hussein is a kooky mobster. And all these points are explained in part by
occasional excerpts from the The Library of Alexandria, the pitch-perfect analogue of Wikipedia. But it's
not just a perfunctory swap of America and Arabia: the mystery involves people and artifacts
that keep showing up from a bizarre other world... very entertaining.

Never
Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. The less is said about the plot, the better. Ishiguro
is a master of understatement. The narration is totally matter-of-fact, and despite what the
characters have to endure, much of the plot is just about kids being kids. As a result an
almost unbearable tension seems to pervade the entire book. I loved
it. Forget looking at reviews (many of which have spoilers), just go read it. Recommended.

Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson. Daniel Waterhouse plays assistant to some of the great minds of the 17th
century, including Newton and Leibniz. It certainly has the Neal Stephenson quality of
continuously amusing prose. The plot stalls a bit towards the end, but from what I gather the
next two books are better in this respect.

We
Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler. Rosemary Cooke recounts
her, um, unusual family life, and she's quite compelling especially as she peels back the
onion layers of her recollections to unearth the truth. Recommended.

Wool
by Hugh Howey. Due to toxicity of Earth's atmosphere, what remains of humanity lives in a creaky and cramped old
"silo" that descends 144 stories underground. Of course, things are not quite as they seem, and
murders ensue. A fun and light read, though Howey is a first-time author, and unfortunately the
writing is distractingly bad at times.

Ninety
Percent of Everything by Rose George. The subtitle is Inside Shipping, the Invisible
Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate. After
reading The Box, I really
was captured by the notion of intermodal transportation and its effects, and started looking for
more in that vein. Ninety Percent of Everything is about the human side of the industry,
and the author spent a month and a half at sea on the Maersk Kendal while writing this
book. If there is anything I took away from this book it's that the sea is a lawless place. Of
course, pirates and weather are both unsympathetic. But additionally, sailors are often
marginalized people and for various reasons they don't receive the legal protections most of us
are accustomed to. A sailor involved in a shipwreck might be lucky to receive a formal
investigation into the accident. (Compare this to the endless investigation that takes place
anytime a passenger plane crashes anywhere.) As George puts it, "the sea dissolves
paper." Ninety Percent of Everything is a decent read, but not really the successor
to The Box that I was looking for.

Some
Remarks by Neal Stephenson. A collection of a couple of short stories and (mostly) essays
that have appeared in various places. Fully one third of this book is a surprisingly
gripping overview of the planning, construction, and maintenance of the undersea fiberoptic cables
that tie the internet together. And in "Locked In," Stephenson presents one of the most salient
examples of technological path-dependence: of all the ways we could get to space, it's a
self-perpetuating historical accident that we do it by strapping things to large tanks of
flammables. Super interesting throughout; recommended.

After
Dark. Interlinked stories that all take place on a single night in Tokyo, starting from
just before midnight. This isn't Murakami at his most imaginative, but I did enjoy the dialogue and
the dreamlike mood of the story. Also, it's a really quick read.

Blind
Willow, Sleeping Woman. A collection of short stories. It's quite entertaining, but I
thought that the stories, on the whole, are not nearly as memorable as those in The Elephant
Vanishes (see below).

Dance
Dance Dance. I suppose it's about the narrator's search for fulfillment in the
modern world. It's really funny: there's Murakami's usual crazy cast of characters, but my
favorites are the narrator's ward— a precocious teenage girl— and her parents: a
spacey photographer mom, and a clueless writer dad named Hiraku Makimura (yes, really). I
enjoyed it a lot, and I think it's one of Murakami's best. Recommended.

The
Elephant Vanishes. A collection of short stories. This was the first of Murakami that I
read, and I wanted to circle back to it. It's packed to the gills with whimsy. Some of my
favorites: "The Dancing Dwarf," about a guy who works at an elephant factory (yes), and "Barn
Burning," wherein the narrator meets a seemingly nice guy with an uh, unusual
hobby. Recommended.

Sputnik
Sweetheart. When his friend Sumire disappears into thin air, the unnamed narrator is
summoned to a remote Greek island at the behest of Sumire's lover, an older woman named Miu. Rather
melancholy.

Underground:
The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Murakami manages to interview many of the
survivors, and some of the perpetrators, of Aum Shinrikyo's 1995 sarin gas attack on the Toyko
subway system. He acts more like an editor than an interviewer, letting each interviewee tell
his or her story. What I found particularly interesting is that Aum's members, though not the most social
folks, were hardly what you would call marginalized people. Aum was able to recruit scientists and
engineers, people who could have made a decent living in the "real world", and get them to build its chemical weapons!
All in all, quite haunting.

What
I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Murakami's meditations about training in Boston
for the NYC marathon, and the relationship between the thankless task of running and the thankless
task of writing. A bit long for its content, but it is a nice view into Murakami's mind.

Disclosure

I'm a software engineer at DNAnexus, Inc. This blog represents the opinion of myself and no one else.Unless specifically noted otherwise, I do not receive free review copies of books or other products mentioned here.